The author gives the age of majority as an example. Presumably the right to vote should be based on _relevant_ features of a person (in a word, "maturity"), not how many times the Earth has gone around the sun since they were born. But it wouldn't be practical for everyone to come to consensus on how to assess "maturity", whereas it _is_ practical for everyone to come to consensus on how to subtract dates, so our _shared_ socially-constructed category of "legal adulthood" ends up being defined in terms of a semi-arbitrary age cut-off, at the cost of mature 16-year-olds and immature 20-year-olds losing out on or gaining privileges that they should or shouldn't have (respectively).
-When people need to coordinate on making the _same_ arbitrary-on-the-merits choice, they tend to converge on an option that is (for whatever reason) unusually _salient_. This is the concept of a "Schelling point", after famed economist Thomas Schelling, who posed the question of where strangers should attempt to meet in New York, if they couldn't communicate to pick a rendezvous point in advance. The plurality answer turns out to be "noon at the information booth at Grand Central Station", not because of any properties that make Grand Central Station an objectively superior meeting place that you would pick even if you _could_ communicate in advance, but just because its centrality makes it the focus of reasonable mutual expectations about what you and your partner are likely to do. Similarly, noon is salient as the midpoint of the day. There's no particular reason to meet at noon rather than 9 _a.m._ or 11 _a.m._ or 3 _p.m._, _except_ that choosing 9 or 11 or 3 would seem to demand a particular reason that you expect your counterpart to be able to derive independently.
+<a id="schelling-point"></a>When people need to coordinate on making the _same_ arbitrary-on-the-merits choice, they tend to converge on an option that is (for whatever reason) unusually _salient_. This is the concept of a "Schelling point", after famed economist Thomas Schelling, who posed the question of where strangers should attempt to meet in New York, if they couldn't communicate to pick a rendezvous point in advance. The plurality answer turns out to be "noon at the information booth at Grand Central Station", not because of any properties that make Grand Central Station an objectively superior meeting place that you would pick even if you _could_ communicate in advance, but just because its centrality makes it the focus of reasonable mutual expectations about what you and your partner are likely to do. Similarly, noon is salient as the midpoint of the day. There's no particular reason to meet at noon rather than 9 _a.m._ or 11 _a.m._ or 3 _p.m._, _except_ that choosing 9 or 11 or 3 would seem to demand a particular reason that you expect your counterpart to be able to derive independently.
We usually expect the question of what sex (or "gender") a person is to have a _canonical answer_ that everyone agrees on: it would be pretty confusing for bystanders if I thought Pat was a woman and said "Pat ... she" and you thought Pat was a man and said "Pat ... he."
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff